Center of Gravity Construct

[pvebber]

1- if no COG exists create one!!!!and this may be the greatest opportunity that their is to defeat an insurgency.

Can you create a COG in an enemy system? Or is this a case of you recognising and exploiting the enemy COG when he may not have done his homework to figure out how to leverage it himself?...

(aside: Something I fear we suffer from far more than our adversaries...Where do we articulate our COGs and promote an understanding of them publically? Does it make sense for an open society to keep them secret? Particularly if they tend to relate to the openness of our society?)

...Or is this represenative of that desire to "directly attack the COG?"

2-In a basic 5 rings analysis of COG's there is usually a minimum of 25 to 75 targets you will need to effect in order to change the system.

Not to be too pedantic (but likely anyway ...) The targets are not the COG, but nodes that make up a CV, the attack of which can change a system which affects the adversary's ability to exploit his COG. I'm not sure a "System can be a COG" - I have to think about that...

Also, Only when you are dealing with a "complicated" but fundamentally "Simple" physical domain systems.

(Aside: As opposed to a complex system in the adative, emergent behavior sense - simple systems can be extremely complicated systems of physical componants - even with some "comples" subsystem behaviors concealed in "black boxes", but don't exhibit adaptive emergent behaviors at the macro scale - like power grids - they have a "black box" of repair capbility that is somewhat emergent and adaptive, but the overall power grid is a physically grounded, very complicated "simple system".)

The 5 -rings model applies to hierarchical "nation-state" type adversaries with predominantly physical CVs organized in "simple" system domains (the rings). Targets in the sense you use are the result of a functional analysis or a particular rings CVs into discrete people, places, or things - a physical domain focused view of the problem.

Are AQ-like entities amenable to "5-rings analysis"? - I would argue not in the strict sense, but may have a different "N-rings analysis" we may not have synthsized yet. Though likely not as phyiscial-domain centric as we would like.

An interesting related papaper: "Five Rings or a Loop in 4GW"